No One Cares About Economic Data Anymore. That’s Good News.

If people in your office seem to be tingling with excitement this week, it is probably because of all the big economic news on the way. The two biggest regular United States economic reports are scheduled to come out, with first-quarter gross domestic product on tap for Wednesday and April jobs numbers out on Friday. Federal Reserve policy makers are meeting Tuesday and Wednesday for one of their regular sessions to set the nation’s monetary policy. And a variety of other important data releases are coming, including personal income and spending, manufacturing and home prices.

What, no tingling? You’re not alone. Because as important as all that stuff is, it is substantially less important, and less interesting, than it has been any time in the last seven years. The economy has gotten boring, and that’s fantastic news — even if it would be even better news if that underlying growth path were a bit stronger.

After a steep housing downturn, a catastrophic recession and a glacially slow return to growth, the United States economy has spent the last three years displaying astonishing consistency. It is growing a bit, but only a bit, faster, than 2 percent. It is adding about 2 million jobs a year.

The last few years, miserable as they have been for typical workers, have been glory days for the people who parse the latest evidence to see whether the economy is slowing up or speeding down: business forecasters, bank economists, central bankers, economic journalists.

Image

CreditTomi Um

In 2007, everybody was looking for evidence of whether the housing sector collapse and financial freeze-up that began was going to have an impact on the overall economy. (It didn’t, at least until the end of the year.) In 2008, a deep recession was underway, and in 2009 it ended. In 2010 and 2011, the recovery seemed so soft and fragile that there seemed to be new evidence every day that it was faltering. But since 2012, the story has been quite different.

Economic data can jump around for any given month or quarter for all kinds of reasons. For example, fourth-quarter gross domestic product was relatively strong thanks to a one-time buildup of business inventories, and the first-quarter number is expected to be weak because of bad winter weather. But over a longer time horizon, those fluctuations should wash out and the true trend become evident.

The accompanying chart shows that trend, in the form of job creation.

You’ll see similar consistency if you look at G.D.P. growth, industrial output or any number of other measures of economic well-being. In a reflection of that consistency in the economic data, the Federal Reserve is on a similarly predictable path, slowing the rate of its stimulus program gradually over the course of this year (a path that the central bank is all but certain to affirm at its meeting this week).

So why do I take this consistency as such good news, even though it is slower than the kind of growth that would rapidly return the nation to a position of full economic health?

Because it is a sign that the nation has gotten out of crisis mode. No longer does another downturn seem to lurk around every corner. Corporate executives have spent the last several years complaining about uncertainty hanging around the economy. Now the economy — and business confidence — seems to take even potentially damaging episodes, like the government shutdown last October, in stride.

And while 3 or 4 percent growth would be better, steady repair of the economy beats a return of a boom-bust cycle that might have accompanied a quicker recovery, particularly if it had been driven by a return to bubble-era housing construction.

Boring consistency is terrible news for people who want to write splashy headlines about the latest data. But it’s good news for everybody else.